Big Night
Some night Tuesday night. L was attending her first ever Pacers game – a preseason game against a team from Israel – with a buddy from school. Their family gets tickets from a family friend, so several times a year they get to sit on the floor, right next to the basket on the visitor’s end of the court. She…
PG, Pritchard, & the Pacers
How’s this for symmetry: when the calendar passed from Saturday to Sunday, we were officially on the backside of 2017. And when we passed from Sunday to Monday, we were officially on the downhill slope of our summer break. Weird! We’ve been busy with several family events: gatherings, trips to the lake, visitors from Boston. But I did want to…
(Near) Brush With Celebrity
I’ll run through a whole spring sports roundup next week. But one quick, funny story worth sharing now. Wednesday L had soccer practice and C had a softball game at the same time, at the same complex. I dropped C off at her diamond, walked L over to her field, and then returned to the softball side and dropped my…
Hawks (Of Many Kinds)
Worlds collide to make the first post of the week an easy-to-name one. First, a few words about Naadir Tharpe leaving the Jayhawks basketball program. I felt sorry for Naadir all season. He was clearly miscast as a primary point guard for a national championship contending caliber team. But, thanks to several misses on the recruiting trail by Bill Self1,…
Weekend Sports And Weather
Ominous skies here in Indy today. We’ve had a couple of small snow events already, nothing that accumulated, but tonight we may get as much as an inch. And then the temperatures are expected to to tumble for most of the week. I guess Mother Nature still has some bitchiness left after the (seemingly) endless winter of 2012-13. We have…
Tip Time
It’s time. The Pacers kick off their regular season and KU plays their first exhibition game tonight. Two teams with huge expectations begin their journeys to hopefully joyful spring endings. More about the Jayhawks next week, when their real season begins. For now, the focus is on the Pacers. I heard one national radio blowhard1 say he expected the Pacers…
Sports Notes
The promised thoughts on a few of the biggest sports news of the holiday week. Brad Stevens to the Boston Celtics. I was walking into a local brewery to fill growlers for the weekend last Wednesday when I got a text asking what I thought about the move. My first response was “Holy shit!” There were no rumbles here in…
Coming Up Short
I guess the Heat responded Monday night. They played like the team they were all regular season, like the team they were constructed to be, and after a sloppy first quarter, methodically took control and blew the Pacers out. Before the game, I told my buddy E-bro in ATX that logic dictated the Heat would win. The odds were far…
Big Day
So I drafted this earlier today, before the news that the Royals have replaced their hitting coaches with George Brett and Pedro Grifo. So I guess something did happen. Whether that’s big news or not is another story. It feels like a big day for sports. Tonight, the Pacers take on the Heat in game five of the Eastern Conference…
Ain’t That America
We spent the long holiday weekend as most Indiana residents who don’t go to the Speedway did: sitting near a body of water, listening to the Indy 500 on the radio1 while drinking beer with friends and waiting for some food that was slowly roasting on the grill to be ready. The weather was not ideal; it was unseasonably cool…